Seasonal Infective Disorder; Confessions of an Eternal Optimist
A Scene on the Ice, Hendrick Avercamp (1585 - 1634), oil on panel, circa 1610-1620. 1958: bequeathed to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, by Daniël George van Beuningen (1877-1955), Vierhouten. Source: Erwin Jurschitza, The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH.
by Julia Sneden
I have a friend who has recently begun treatment for a condition called "Seasonal Affective Disorder," sometimes referred to as SAD. She describes it as starting in late autumn with a feeling of fatigue and generalized depression, increasing in depth and continuing into January and February, lifting only with the advent of spring. Apparently she has suffered from it for many years, but only recently discovered that it is an actual disorder, identifiable and treatable.
"So you don’t enjoy Thanksgiving or Christmas?" I asked.
"Oh," she said, "they happen, but I really couldn't even enjoy visits from my grandchildren, because they would exhaust me. For weeks both before and after the holidays I was no good to anyone, least of all to myself. Until March, I was just blah, and certainly no fun to live with."
I didn't ask what’s in the pills the doctor has prescribed for her, but whatever their makeup, they seem to help, because she is positively a whirlwind of energy these days. Or maybe it is just that a few over-achieving bulbs have poked up some green shoots through the snow and mulch just outside her front door, a sure sign that Spring is on its way even though we are only at the last days of January. Of course, on second thought, those shoots may have emerged at the same time last year, but she was just too blah to notice them.
I happen to love the changing seasons, just for themselves, each one arriving in prescribed order, year after year, and delivering us to the season that follows just when we have begun to be bored with the current one. We mark seasons not only by the length of light versus dark before and after the solstices or equinoxes, but also by the need to rearrange the clothes in our closet(s) from cold weather to less cold weather, and then to warmer, and on to really hot weather, etc..
Of course we also mark the turn of seasons by events that recur yearly, like Christmas and Chanukah and Easter and Halloween and Thanksgiving and Fourth of July, or even just the Day that the Swimming Pool Opens for the Summer. The changes of light and dark belong to nature, over which we have no say, but the events belong to people.
Now that I think about it, it doesn’t take much to infect me with enthusiasm for either kind of seasonal change. I love the natural changes in the growing dark of autumn, or the early brightness of summer, but also the event-driven changes like my grandchildren’s delighted anticipation of that final day of the school year.
As an old teacher, I pause to think of the grandchildren’s teachers, whose "final day" will actually come a few days later, after the students have departed and the classroom is tidied up, and all the lists of old textbooks and supplies are turned in, along with repair lists to give to the maintenance workers, and wish lists of what new items would be wonderful to have in the classroom come Fall.
I remember from my own days as a teacher that an empty classroom is both dreary and delicious, once the children are gone. You miss the kids, but you also anticipate the joy of the first morning of your summer break, when at last you can wake up without the alarm beeping away in your ear, and you can linger over a cup of coffee and read the pristine newspaper before husband or children get their hands on it … if, that is, you don't have an early summer class in which you will be the student, as you struggle to fulfill the required number of "continuing education" hours required by your State Board of Instruction. I don’t deny the need for teachers to keep up with the latest educational theories and advances, but let me tell you that anyone who thinks school teachers have too much vacation needs to consider how little of it is actually spent vacantly. No wonder I used to greet the end of August with relief, despite the return of the 6:30 setting on my alarm clock.
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